Quirk in Major League Baseball Tiebreaker Rules Could Produce Surprise Post-Season Result

The addition of a second wild card team to the Major League Baseball playoffs, combined with an unusually large number of close division races, has created a blistering array of possibilities, even though there are, as I write this on Sunday morning, only four days left in the regular season.

The possibilities are greatest in the American League where eight teams are still in contention for the three division championships and the two wild card spots, and no team has clinched a place in the post-season.  (In contrast, in the National League, four of the five post-season qualifiers have been established.)

Not only is it possible that all three American League Divisions could end with ties for first place, it is also possible that as many as four teams could end up tied for the two wild card positions.

On September 9, a seemingly endless list of rules pertaining to playoff tiebreakers was posted on Major League Baseball’s webpage, www.mlb.com (http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20120907&content_id=38029316&vkey=news_mlb_nd&c_id=mlb).

The term “playoff game” is a more narrow term in baseball than it is in other professional team sports.  Major League Baseball uses the term “playoff games” to refer only to those extra games required to determine which teams qualify for “post-season” games like the League Championship Series and the World Series.

Moreover, it has long been the rule that “playoff games” count as part of the regular season, both in terms of player statistics and team won-lost records.  However, post-season wins and losses and individual player statistics are compiled separately from those of the regular season.

For example, in 1959, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves ended the regular season tied for first place in the National League with identical records of 86-68 (in a 154 game season).  The Dodgers then won a best-two-of-three-game playoff by a margin of two games to none.  Consequently, the Dodgers were officially credited with a final won-lost record of 88-68, and the Braves, 86-70.  In addition, all pitching and batting performances in those two games were added into the players’ 1959 totals, although the statistics compiled by Dodger players during the subsequent World Series were not.

More recently, in 2007, the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres tied for the then-one NL wild card spot with records of 89-73.  The Rockies defeated the Padres, 9-8, in a one-game playoff, a victory which raised their regular season record to 90-73.  In that game, Rockies left-fielder Matt Holiday went 2-6 with a triple and two rbi’s, which lowered his league-leading batting average from .3397 to .3396, but increased his league leading hit and rbi totals to 216 and 137, respectively.  Holliday’s league-leading totals included statistics from the playoff game.

How the application of the “playoff games count as regular season games” might affect the tiebreaker system can be seen in the following example.

Assume that the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees both drop their four remaining contests, while Tampa Bay wins its final four games.  Assume also that Texas splits its Sunday double-header with the Angels and then takes two of three games in its regular-season-ending series with Oakland.  Add to this the assumption that Oakland wins only one of its final four games, while the Angels win four of their five remaining contests.

Should the above events come to pass, the following would be the end-of-season standings in the American League:

EASTERN DIVISION

Baltimore                  91-71

New York                  91-71

Tampa Bay                  91-71

CENTRAL DIVISION

Won by either Detroit or Chicago with no more than 90 wins

WESTERN DIVISION

Texas                                    95-67

Los Angeles                  91-71

Oakland                  91-71

So who goes to the playoffs?  Obviously Texas and the winner of the Central Division are in.  However, a playoff would have to be conducted to determine the winner of the Eastern Division before the wild card teams could be identified.

Under the rules posted at mlb.com, the championship of the Eastern Division would be determined by a two game playoff series with one team getting a first-round bye.  The team with the best intra-division record, which would be Tampa Bay (which under the above scenario would finish Eastern Division play with a 42-30 record, compared to Baltimore’s 41-31 and New York’s 37-35), would then choose either to accept the first round bye and play the second game on the home field of the winner of the first game, or elect to host the first game (and the second, if it prevailed).

For this example, let’s assume that Tampa elects to take the bye.  The first round game would then be played in Baltimore because it has a better intra-divisional record than New York.  Let’s further assume that Baltimore wins the first game but loses the second to Tampa Bay.

At this point, we now have an Eastern Division Champion (Tampa Bay), but the three teams involved in that Eastern Division play-off series would have now played either one or two more regular season games than any of the other American League teams.  Consequently, when we now move to determine the two teams with the best regular season records among the non-division winners, we have the following standings:

Los Angeles                   91-71   .562

Oakland                  91-71   .562

Baltimore                  92-72   .561

New York                  91-72   .558

If we apply another traditional rule — that winning percentage, not total victories, determines position in the standings — then Los Angeles and Oakland would be the two wild card teams, and the seasons of both New York and Baltimore would be over without any additional playoff games.

Is this the intended result?  Is it fair?  As far as I can tell, the posted rules do not address this issue, although presumably there is a document in the Commissioner’s Office that will eventually surface to provide an answer.

Interestingly enough, the tiebreaking rules posted on mlb.com cited above carry with them a curious disclaimer:  “This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.”

It is hard to believe that Major League Baseball does not control the content of its own website.  More likely, the addition of a second wildcard has created such a bizarre, byzantine world of possibilities that MLB itself is not sure that it knows what the rules are, hence the disclaimer.

 

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When Did Wisconsin’s Vote Really Ever Matter?

Both major party presidential candidates in 2012 seem committed to spending time and money campaigning in Wisconsin, and a few pundits have even speculated that the upcoming election might be decided by the votes of the Badger State.

Local enthusiasm aside, how likely is it that Wisconsin’s electoral votes could actually decide the presidential election? Unfortunately, if history is any guide, not very likely.

Since their state’s admission to the United States on May 29, 1848, Wisconsinites have voted in 41 presidential elections, and the state has supported the winning candidate 32 times.

In ten consecutive elections from 1948 until 1984, the Badger state sided with the winning candidate, and had it not been for the surprising decision to support Dewey over FDR in 1948—after voting for Roosevelt by large margins in the three previous elections—the streak would have been 15 in a row.

However, in only one election—that of 1876—did Wisconsin’s votes actually matter, at least in the sense that in all the other elections, had Wisconsin gone with the losing candidate, the result would still have been the same.

The 1876 election was the closest election in American history, with a final electoral vote count of 185 votes for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and 184 votes for Democrat Samuel Tilden. (Students of American history know that these totals were established only after the creation of a special electoral commission to sort out conflicting returns from several Southern states.)

Not only was the 1876 presidential election extremely close on a national level, it was extremely close in Wisconsin as well. Wisconsin voters cast 50.57% of their votes for Hayes, a percentage that only slightly exceeded the 48.19% of the votes cast for Tilden. (The remaining 1.24% went to minor party candidates.) Had Wisconsin cast its 10 electoral votes for Tilden instead of Hayes, the New York Governor would have won the election 194 electoral votes to 175.

There is actually little reason to be surprised that In no other election did the Wisconsin vote determine the outcome. While the popular vote in American presidential elections is often fairly close, in terms of the vote in the Electoral College, there have been very few close presidential elections in U.S. history. Given that Wisconsin’s number of electoral votes has never been greater than 13 and has been as few as 5, only a very close election could be decided by Wisconsin’s vote.

In fact, the only two other presidential elections since 1848 that could have been decided by the votes of a state the size of Wisconsin were the elections of 1916 and 2000. In 1916, incumbent president Woodrow Wilson defeated United States Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes by a margin of 277 to 254, in a year in which Wisconsin had 13 electoral votes. However, because Wisconsin supported Hughes, its votes did not affect the outcome of the election.

The same was true for the 2000 election in which George W. Bush edged Al Gore, 271 to 266, with Wisconsin casting its votes for Gore by a razor thin margin.

Of course it is possible that Wisconsin could make the difference. Were Mitt Romney to carry Indiana, plus all the Southern states except Maryland and Delaware and carry all the states west of the Mississippi River except Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, and California, and carry Alaska, and were President Obama to carry all of the other states, the election would be decided by the candidate that carried Wisconsin.

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We Should Be Careful That We Know What We Are Sticking To, When We Stick To The Constitution

Like my colleague Ed Fallone, I spoke at the Marquette Constitution Day program on Monday, September 17, sponsored by the Marquette Political Science Department. We were joined on the program by Marquette Political Science professors John McAdams and Paul Nolette. The program was centered around the concept of “Sticking to the Constitution.”

For the sake of brevity, I will simply summarize my arguments.

1. The text of the United States Constitution is more important as a symbol of our commitment to democratic government and the rule of law than it is as a source of answers to contemporary problems.

2. The United States Constitution of 1787 has lasted as long as it has because it is extremely brief and extremely vague. These characteristics allow it to be adapted to just about any position on any question, and has thus allowed significant changes to occur in the governmental structure of the United States without the need to alter the text of the constitution. Had it been more specific and detailed, it would have been repealed or substantially amended long ago.

3. The idea that the words of the Constitution have a precise and fixed meaning that transcends time has, in my opinion, led to numerous problems, including the excessive use of the judicial power, which has at times threatened to undermine the democratic process. Positing a precise meaning to imprecise phrases has too often produced the illegitimate overruling of democratically sanctioned practices.

4. A thorough understanding of our constitutional traditions and constitutional history—and I mean “constitutional” in the broad structural and institutional sense—is a better source for constitutional decision-making than a supposedly correct textual interpretation of the words of the constitutional text.

5. Continuing to refer to the members of the convention that drafted the 1787 Constitution as “the Founding Fathers” is kind of juvenile. The 55 men who showed up in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, were important figures in their own time, and James Madison does rank as one of the foremost political thinkers of the eighteenth century. However, the delegates were not sent to the convention from the heights of Mt. Olympus, and they each had their own political agendas.

6. Had the Constitution of 1787 been rejected by the American people in 1787 and 1788, as almost happened, the course of American constitutional history would probably have been pretty much the same. The original constitution, the Articles of Confederation, would have remained in effect, and it surely would have been amended or interpreted as the needs of the present warranted.

7. President Obama’s use of military drones to assassinate our ostensible enemies (and whatever innocent civilians that happen to be standing around) is not consistent with the division of the war-making powers imbedded in the structure of the 1787 Constitution, and it is inconsistent with our constitutional traditions. If you ask me, the practice is both immoral and unconstitutional.

Because of limitations of time, on Monday I actually skipped over point #6, but it is a good point, worth making here.

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